Hau Books
editors Giovanni da Col
Sasha Newell editorial office
Faun Rice Sheehan Moore Michael Chladek Michelle Beckett
Justin Dyer Ian Tuttle
www.haubooks.com
In tribute to the foundational, yet productively contentious, nature of the ethnographic imagination in anthropology, this series honors the creator of the term “ethnographic theory” himself.
Monographs included in this series represent unique contributions to anthropology and showcase groundbreaking work that contributes to the emergence of new ethnographically-inspired theories or challenge the way the “ethnographic” is conceived today.
Hau Books
Hau Books Chicago
MakING INTellIGIBle WoRlDS IN DeaF kaTHMaNDu
By Peter Graif
Commons attribution 2.0. licence at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/2.0/legalcode.
Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9991570-3-9
lCCN: 2018943588 Hau Books
Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. langley
Chicago, Il 60628 www.haubooks.com
Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The university of Chicago Press.
www.press.uchicago.edu
Printed in the united States of america on acid-free paper.
List of Figures xi Chapter 1. arjun: The sense of things 1
Homecomings 1
Not knowing arjun 7
linguistic dilemmas 16
Making sense 23
The presence of arjun 32 Chapter 2. intelligible worlds 37
Necessary words 37
Finding the deaf 46
Deaf geographies 51
The world is not as we think it is 61 Raghav: being two things 68 Chapter 3. Being transparent 77
a history of names 77
language as a thing seen 85 The intelligibility of words 96
Chapter 4. seeing politics 107 Intelligibility play 107 The deafness of mothers and buildings 119 Lorem Ipsum 129 Intelligibility replay 133 Chapter 5. Citing signs 137 The iconic and the arbitrary . . . 137 . . . the long and the short 141 Deaf linguistic theory 151
Bakery mandates 163
Chapter 6. Laxmi: The properties of people 171 The deaf mute speaks! 171 Being laxmi, here and there 175
Talk/intelligible 183
after words 190
References 197 Acknowledgments 211 Index 213
Figure 1: elePHaNT Figure 2: WaTeR
Figure 3: MouNTaIN (himal) Figure 4: ReD
Figure 5: PoRTeR Figure 6: Cook Figure 7: THINGS
Figure 8: Cover of the Nepali Sign language Dictionary Figure 9: HeaVY
Figure 10: IMPoRTaNT Figure 11: BIG
Figure 12: CoW Figure 13: BuFFalo Figure 14: eaSY Figure 15: CleaR Figure 16: DoG Figure 17: WoRk
Figure 18: Staff at the Bakery Cafe in Baneshwar, kathmandu
all images from the Nepali Sign language Dictionary are courtesy of the National Federation of the Deaf Nepal
Arjun: The sense of things
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?
– Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
HomecomingS
Arjun gurung is deaf. He lives in a small room on the third floor of a backpacker hotel in northeastern nepal. His family has owned this hotel since before he was born, and over the last few years especially they’ve earned an international reputation as warm and capable hosts. Their hotel is located on a minor trekking route, and this location brings both tourists and tourist dollars to an otherwise remote and generally poor part of the country. Though Arjun’s family has been prominent in the area for many generations, the cash generated by their hotel has allowed them to maintain this prominence over the past few decades as they, like all nepalis, enter into increasingly global frames of reference.
i first met Arjun in the summer of 2007, when both he and i were in our late twenties. i was on a short break from fieldwork,1 and i had booked a room in his family’s hotel completely unaware that a deaf man lived there. Arjun himself had come home only recently after living for more than two decades in Kathmandu, first at a boarding school for the deaf and then later in an apart- ment with friends. now back home, he stands out. in ways apparent even to outsiders, he just doesn’t look like he comes from here. His family’s hotel basks in a carefully maintained veneer of rural authenticity, and it is surrounded for miles on all sides by the more functional assemblage of new and old that char- acterizes subsistence farming. Arjun, by contrast, is instantly recognizable as an eager participant in nepal’s emerging urban middle class. He wears jeans and designer tee-shirts, he follows the international soccer scene, and he prefers for- eign-brand beer to his mother’s (excellent) homemade apple brandy. His habits, appearance, and disposition simply do not fit with the environment around him.
By his own admission, he felt more comfortable in the city. He says he misses it dearly now that he is away.
As the only deaf person within a ten-mile walk, Arjun probably also misses the large and vibrant deaf community that comprised his daily world when he lived in Kathmandu. in nepal, the deaf care deeply about one another.
Though Arjun would no doubt laugh at the sentimentality of my words here, i think he would, with some caveats, ultimately agree. The bonds of language, 1. The accounts in this book are the product of roughly four years of immersive fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2018. in this chapter, my descriptions of Arjun draw primarily from a period about a year following our first meeting. During that time, i visited him frequently at his home, and my experiences there motivated a major shift in my methodological engagements with deaf nepal. Previously, across a series of shorter research trips between 2003 and 2006, i focused my attention on political expression in the institutional spaces where deaf people congregate.
This preliminary work anticipated the tone of my longest continuous stretch of fieldwork, which took place over eighteen months in 2007 and 2008. These years were characterized by dramatic political changes for nepal in general and for deaf nepal in particular. These changes culminated in a comprehensive peace agreement that ended the decades-long civil war and a contentious election that saw nepal’s first deaf politician join the country’s highest legislative body (see chapter 2). During this period, i began to spend more and more time with the deaf people i knew in their mostly hearing homes, following them especially as they moved between their deaf and hearing worlds. This new approach has characterized my relationship with deaf nepalis since then, especially in short follow-up field visits in 2009 and 2012 and in a more ongoing engagement living and working in Kathmandu from 2014 to the present.
aid, obligation, and friendship that deaf people build are frequently the most powerful and durable parts of their lives. These specifically deaf relationships often outshine (though never fully erase) all their ties to the hearing, relegating even parents, siblings, spouses, and neighbors to the emotional periphery of deaf lives. When those like Arjun from remote parts of the country arrive for the first time in deaf Kathmandu, they tend to describe the experience as a homecoming, steeped in feelings of kinship and belonging. for most, returning completely to the hearing world, like Arjun has done, would be unthinkable.
Arjun, however, tends to shrug off most questions about his place amongst the hearing with a characteristic reserve. He has no plans to leave, he says, so the question of whether he likes being back home just isn’t relevant or interesting.
This kind of self-effacement was very typical of Arjun in the time i knew him.
He is friendly but cool, engaging but undemonstrative, and most of all always very self-composed. He tells great stories, but his affect is so flat that it can be hard to know how he intends for his audiences to react. Though i am certain that Arjun misses his deaf friends back in Kathmandu, he never admitted it to me.
conversations about politics, however, often leave Arjun visibly angry. in particular, he is angry about rural nepal’s “lack of development,” which for him seems to describe a particular mindset more than any absence of infrastructure.
nepal is a country of vast potential, he says, but it is stifled by a range of deep problems: corrupt politicians, backwards-thinking citizens, ineffective foreign aid, and—especially—an archaic and burdensome system of kinship obliga- tions. These are familiar targets of middle-class frustration in contemporary nepal, but for Arjun they are all explicitly rooted in a more basic question of individual desire. How, he would often ask, are we meant to resolve the tensions between what people want for themselves and what is good for their communi- ties? To hear him tell it, the entirety of nepal’s recent history is a story about the rise of individualism. He attributed these transformations mostly to Western influences, though it was not always clear to me whether he understood the changes he saw as the cause of or the solution to rural nepal’s many contempo- rary problems. Perhaps he meant them to be both. in any case, Arjun always seemed to me preoccupied by the question of what it means to be someone who wants things. This same air of irresolution—where the personal and the social collide—colored every account i heard Arjun make of his life and especially his decision to return home.
Arjun is home because his parents expected him to marry and because he reluctantly agreed that it was time. He sold his few things in the capital, bought
a tourist-class bus ticket to a nearby trekking hub, and walked the seven remain- ing hours home. Two months later, he was married. none of his friends from Kathmandu were invited to the banquet, though Arjun says he has no regrets.
He says he likes being married, but he adds that he is in no rush to have children.
He cites nepal’s poor political situation and a lack of good schools in the area as reasons to wait a few more years. He admits that this decision has become a point of contention with Suddha, his wife. Suddha is not deaf, nor does she know any deaf people other than her husband. She comes from a poor but well- regarded family of sharecroppers a half-day’s walk from the main road. Though she is significantly better educated than her very limiting socioeconomic back- ground would predict, her manner, disposition, and dialect nevertheless make it very clear that she was born into a household quite different from the one in which she now lives. The class dynamics at play here are nuanced, but they also boil down to some very simple facts: Arjun’s maternal uncles are regional land- lords of some note, and his father has a reputation for getting politicians elected;
most of Suddha’s male relatives, meanwhile, are day laborers.
nevertheless, things between Arjun and Suddha moved forward quickly be- cause everyone agreed that the marriage was such an obviously good fit. At face value, this is a strange claim. every visible sign tells the story of the couple’s very different life histories. They are affectionate with each other, but even a year af- ter their wedding they were still often bashful and awkward in each other’s com- pany. Arjun acknowledged this tension, which he attributed to the fits and starts of their learning how to interact. But marriage negotiations have a tendency to collapse otherwise incommensurate schemes of value. given the preference in the area for marriage between equals, it would seem that Arjun’s deafness and Suddha’s humble station came somehow to balance in the tally of social status that preceded their match. This is actually a very familiar type of marriage in contemporary nepal: men with discrete, personal stigmas (e.g., various disabili- ties, addictions, or personality “quirks”) often marry women with more gradient, familial disadvantages (e.g., low class, capital, or prestige). Though it is impolite to speak too explicitly about the benefits and compromises that a marriage al- liance might bring, both families told me how relieved they are to have found each other. even Arjun, though famously taciturn, is prone to gush about just how much he and Suddha are in love.
Despite his happy marriage, however, Arjun admits that he is desperately bored. in Kathmandu, he involved himself in political movements, dated both deaf and hearing girls, and worked as a tutor at the school that he had once
attended. Then, after more than twenty years away, he came back to a “home”
he had visited only a few dozen times since childhood. He spends most of his time now doing chores around the hotel, but the work is repetitive and usually better handled by his family’s large and very competent staff. on top of it all, he doesn’t even have other fluent signers to talk to. As Arjun puts it, there’s just not a lot to do here. He enjoys managing the family’s stable of horses and chatting with the international tourists who pass through town, but, these small pleasures aside, the transition has not been easy. more than once, i arrived at the hotel to find Arjun and his mother mired in the aftermath of an argument and actively ignoring each other. This is a very familiar story in contemporary nepal’s emerging middle classes: A young son from a prominent rural family is sent away to the capital city to get an education that is unavailable closer to home. While living there, he acquires tastes, habits, and ideas incompatible with the rhythms and values of everything he left behind. Though Arjun is deaf, the structure of his experience belongs to a much wider scope. He is, in many ways, very typical of an entire generation of dislocated youth.
There is a single detail, however, that makes this story unmistakably deaf:
here at home, all of the people closest to Arjun believe that he is a simpleton.
They think—incorrectly—that he has only a childish understanding of what goes on around him and that he is incapable of language or complex thought.
They are unaware, for example, that he can read, write, and even do basic book- keeping. His english is arguably better than theirs, and he has a decent grasp of french, german, Hebrew, and japanese. He has cultivated this polylingual- ism in a series of meticulously organized notebooks, each filled with words and phrases taught to him by his international clientele. He often studies these notebooks late into the night, and he says that one day he hopes to compile them into a universal dictionary and phrasebook. in ways that would seem ob- vious, Arjun is exceptionally intelligent. He has a bone-dry sense of humor with a strong penchant for sarcasm; he follows national politics but chooses not to vote; and he considers professional wrestling (which his parents adore) to reflect poorly on American culture. He is the only person within a half-day’s walk who understands the hotel’s solar electric system, and he plans to buy a few extra panels in the near future to power a television and an Xbox. Within virtually any other frame of recognition, Arjun would be unmistakable as the most cosmopolitan member of his family. Yet somehow his parents—though plainly devoted to the happiness of their only child—believe that he is an actual, literal idiot.
for reasons that are not yet clear, Arjun’s family members do not easily see in him the elaborate structures of mind that they take for granted in each other and in everyone else. He is, to them, almost animal-like in his way of being a person. The precise entailments of this assessment are nuanced enough, complex enough, and culturally specific enough to justify the remainder of this chapter’s attention, but as a beginning let it suffice to say that he is treated by those around him as the kind of person from whom very little should be expected and to whom very little should be offered. neighbors and cousins talk about Arjun with diminutive pronouns more appropriate for toddlers, dogs, or bad drivers, and the trekking guides who come through town have been known to get drunk and tease him, ostensibly for not understanding that he is being teased. for her part, Arjun’s mother often relates how proud she is of her son, and yet even her most boastful stories invariably highlight behaviors that would be unremarkable from any adult man seen as fully competent. That Arjun can, for example, feed and clothe himself, travel into town alone, and follow simple housekeeping rou- tines apparently strikes her as something worth bragging about. meanwhile, she seems not even to notice her son’s many complex engagements with the world outside his home. instead, the broader scope of Arjun’s human experience—vir- tually everything he thinks, does, and is—remains somehow lost to the noise.
Arjun is characteristically stoic about these circumstances, but it is hard for me not to feel staggered by frustration on his behalf. After all, social life is built on the premise of intersubjectivity. Knowing other people means having ways of speculating about what they are experiencing. Skeptics might argue that we can never truly know anything about the minds of others, but in nepal at least this posture of solipsism is at most a thought experiment and never actually a way of relating to real people in the world. instead, under all normal circumstances, we sense purpose in the things that others do. We perceive in their actions the presence of thoughts, sentiments, and drives—unique in configuration perhaps but ultimately human in nature. even when the connections between outward actions and internal mental states are hard to see, we maintain a deep trust in the fact that they exist (see robbins 2008; robbins and rumsey 2008). eth- nographic research, in particular, would be inconceivable without the orienting assumption that people everywhere have minds that make sense. This is what Adolf Bastian famously called the “psychic unity of mankind,” and it is what allows us—even in the face of stark cultural difference—to engage coherently with others. Arjun is somehow exempt from this unity at home, and in this book my aim is to understand how and why that came to be.
noT KnoWing Arjun
in telling Arjun’s story here, my goal is not to suggest that he is in any way typical. indeed, deaf lives in nepal are widely diverse, and the sheer extent of Arjun’s isolation is actually quite unusual. His experience of living at the margins of hearing expectations, however, is universal. Deaf lives are lived in predominantly hearing worlds, and hearing worlds often do a very poor job of relating to deaf experiences. especially in matters of identity, language, and personhood, the deaf are constantly misunderstood. in recent years, docu- menting and correcting this history has been the primary aim of the newly emerging academic discipline known as deaf studies. Since its rise in the 1960s amidst the successes of humanism, feminism, and the civil rights movement, deaf studies has worked hard to demonstrate the value and complexity of everything native to deaf communities (Ladd 2003; Padden and Humphries 2009). central to this ambition has been an explicitly ethnographic argument:
namely, when we consider the various languages, beliefs, and practices of deaf communities worldwide, we should understand them not merely as adapta- tions to the hearing world but instead as the autonomous, constituting parts of a distinctly deaf cultural modality (see, e.g., monaghan et al. 2003). According to this framework of analysis, Arjun’s dilemma would be very familiar: though his family members see his disability, they fail completely to understand his identity.
This emphasis on identity as a driver of cultural difference has been tre- mendously productive for deaf studies, but there are some hard constraints on what it can reveal. it grants complexity to deaf communities precisely by strip- ping it from the families, publics, and contexts in which deaf people are always immersed. Arjun’s mother, for example, talks about her son as someone flatly deprived of human capacities, but she does not always act as if this is so. in day- to-day practice, her engagements are much more contextually entangled. She sees Arjun affable and animated with the backpackers who pass through town, and she relies on him to attend to their needs as customers. What she seems not to perceive, however, is the substance of interiority that should normally ac- company these behaviors. even as Arjun manages food orders, guest check-ins, and complicated billing cycles effectively, she believes that he acts with no real understanding of what he does. As she puts it, “The tourists are nice to him, but he doesn’t understand them. He brings them the menus, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t even know what menus are for. He smiles because they smile.”
The tourists themselves, meanwhile, interpreted their interactions with Arjun very differently. They felt uncomfortable initially, they said, but ultimately they were surprised by how easy it was to interact with him despite his deafness.
indeed, Arjun is a master at putting his guests at ease. He shows interest in their lives, and he teaches them with obvious pleasure how he communicates effec- tively. on the occasions that i observed it, this would usually begin with simple gestures supported by notes written on scraps of paper, which then progressed over the course of the evening through increasingly elaborate acts of pantomime (accompanied, usually, by no small amount of both laughter and alcohol). Peo- ple like Arjun. He is an excellent host. every morning, before the tourists set off to continue further up the mountain, they linger with him over long goodbyes.
His notebooks are filled with the messages of remembrance that they have left, and he regularly gets thick stacks of postcards delivered from abroad. When i asked Arjun’s mother about these interactions, however, she merely smiled and reaffirmed how nice it was that the foreigners were kind to her son.
for a man understood to be a simpleton, Arjun is remarkably effective at navigating the nuances of cross-cultural customer service. This alignment of cir- cumstances would seem to present an obvious paradox, but critically his mother does not experience it as such. She loves her son, and she tells anyone who will listen how glad she is to have him back at home. nevertheless—somehow—she perceives remarkably little about him. in the places that should be filled by meaning, she sees instead actions without purpose and efficacy without under- standing. These assessments are conspicuous and difficult to explain. After all, Arjun’s mother is a lodger of foreign tourists by trade, and she is surrounded constantly by people she does not understand. most of her guests speak lan- guages that she doesn’t know, and they all have habits and dispositions that she finds strange. in a very real way, her livelihood is built from the gaps left by cultural and linguistic difference, and yet she does not hesitate to fill these gaps with meaning, or at least the possibility of it. on one occasion, she even pressed me with obvious amusement to explain why foreigners are so eager to carry heavy backpacks up a mountain and call it a “vacation.” in the end, she concluded it must have something to do with “American culture.” in this capac- ity and countless others, her ways of not knowing her guests are very different from her ways of not knowing her son.
on one particular visit, for example, i arrived to find Arjun’s mother stum- bling over herself to explain a complicated bill to a japanese tourist. The con- versation wasn’t going well, and both of them were struggling to maintain their
good humor. Her guest was upset, and it wasn’t clear to her why. This led her to speculate urgently about the contents of his mind. The problem, she guessed, had something to do with how lodging for his porters had been tallied, but that’s as far as she could get. in these moments of breakdown, the only thing she had at her disposal was a vast set of heuristics built through years of trial and error. She was adamant, for example, that one should never smile too much at japanese people when they are feeling frustrated. “it makes them mad,” she said. “That’s all i know.” in this regard, though her guest was profoundly foreign to her, his foreignness had in its own way come to be something familiar. it served not only to separate her from him but also to connect them together through a shared experience of mutual opacity: “i don’t understand him, and he knows i don’t understand him, and i know that he knows that i don’t understand him . . . ,”
she explained with a laugh. About Arjun, her reflections are much simpler. “He’s dumb, poor thing. He knows his desires, but he understands nothing else.”
it is as if there is a single rule that defines for Arjun’s family how everything he does should be interpreted: namely, his actions are only and exactly what they appear to be. They do not reveal something else about him, they do not indicate his state of mind, and they do not communicate his intentions or goals in anything but the most immediate sense. When Arjun gets on the roof to manipulate the solar panels, for example, his actions do not demonstrate that he understands electrical circuits; when he spends more than an hour each morning styling his hair and selecting his clothes, his choices do not reveal any interest in fashion; when he reads newspapers, journals, and magazines, his time spent does not suggest that he might be knowledgeable about politics and current events.
indeed, even as Arjun fills notebook after notebook with a staggering diversity of words and phrases, the fact that he can do so does not even demonstrate that he has access to language. instead, when Arjun writes, his family perceives only and exactly that. He is not studying, he is not recording, and he is not commu- nicating. He is merely applying ink to a sheet of paper, and nothing more.
Deaf people worldwide live amidst broad patterns of misrecognition, but these constraints on how Arjun’s actions can be interpreted are especially per- plexing. As i will argue in the coming pages, understanding them properly re- quires careful attention to the details of his life and context. nepali ways of not-knowing the deaf are deeply regional in their organization, and any other cultural configuration—built on any other set of epistemological practices, any other social architecture of perception, or any other history of discourse—
could have situated Arjun in completely different circumstances. indeed, this
possibility that things could have been very different for Arjun is exactly what georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, described in his Natural History. in this massively ambitious catalog of everything, Leclerc includes the story of a young man in eighteenth-century france who, after more than twenty years of life, comes to hear and speak for the first time. What shocks his family and community, however, is less his miraculous cure than the revelations that come after:
A young man twenty-three to twenty-four years old, son of a craftsman of chartres, deaf and dumb from birth, suddenly began to speak, to the great as- tonishment of all the city. it was known to him that some three or four months before he had heard the sound of bells, and had been extremely surprised by this new and unfamiliar sensation. Then a kind of water escaped his left ear, and he began to hear perfectly in both ears: for three or four months he listened without saying anything, and maturing in pronunciation and ideas of the words, and finally he thought himself able to break the silence, and it is said that he spoke though still imperfectly.
Skilled theologians immediately questioned him about his past state, and unraveled their main issues about god, the soul, the moral goodness or evil ac- tions. He did not seem to have pushed his thoughts far.
Although born of literate catholic parents, he attended mass, and he was there instructed to make the sign of the cross and kneel in the capacity of a man who prays, he never had attached to all this any intention or other meaning; he knew not distinctly what it was that is death, and he never thought on it. (Buffon 1801, 231; see also rée 1999, 92, for a different analysis thereof)
Though Leclerc’s anonymous young deaf man kneeled, took communion, and moved his lips in prayer, he did not in fact believe; he had no thoughts of death or what came after and no remembrance of christ’s suffering. instead, his reli- gious devotion was mere replication. This minimal physicality was a sufficient mimesis because he found no reason to see the acts of those around him as any- thing more. There are clear echoes here of Arjun’s life, though the players and assumptions are conspicuously reversed. just as Arjun’s parents never seem to question the constraints they perceive on the access Arjun has to everything that surrounds him, these parents of chartres were horrified to learn that their son had copied their behaviors without also sharing their sense of purpose. Though these cases are built on diametrically opposed assessments of the deaf, they are
unified by a single human tendency: people—when faced with the fact of actors and actions—maintain assumptions about the entailments of agency that are remarkably stable across time. Through a lifetime of interactions and potential disruptions, their intuitions perdure.
in my presence at least, the only person who ever expressed any doubt over these assessments of Arjun was Suddha, and her way of talking about her hus- band offers something of an exception to clarify the rule. Though her role as a young daughter-in-law in a busy household made it logistically difficult for me to interview her at any length, she was nevertheless always eager to talk.
She stopped me repeatedly in passing moments, invariably to ask the same very pointed question: How could she know what Arjun is thinking? initially, i found this a very strange question for her to be asking. Suddha is actually reasonably proficient as a signer. She is the only person in the immediate area who can communicate effectively with Arjun about anything more than basic topics. nevertheless, this fact of access seems not to make her assessments any more straightforward. The hesitation she feels serves to color the intimacy the two of them share.
Arjun and Suddha often spend their evenings together in a gazebo adjoin- ing the main house. Long after everyone else has gone to bed, they huddle close and talk for hours in the signed-language equivalent of hushed tones. To anyone listening, their interactions are silent, punctuated only by frequent laughter. To see them, however, is to realize how animated their time together is. on these nights, they occupy a space that is strikingly out of step with the rest of the hotel’s aesthetic. it is wallpapered with bold and garish posters, each juxtapos- ing an oversaturated stock image with an incongruous bit of reappropriated text. one photo of Alpine cottages bears the subtitle “Silence is consent,” for example, and another, featuring a basket of kittens, declares prominently that
“The family is more sacred than the state.” Arjun’s favorite poster involves an assortment of traditionally dressed foreign natives lined up above the words
“Love conquers all.” Arjun’s parents hate the gazebo and its loud colors. The fact that it even exists is a clear concession to his sense of style and a remembrance of his life in Kathmandu. for precisely this reason, perhaps, Arjun and Suddha prefer it to any other part of the hotel. When i asked each of them separately why they spent so much time there, both of them described it as the one place they could truly be alone. To outward appearances, at least, this is a very familiar scene: here is a young couple, fully enamored with each other, talking (as Arjun later explained to me) about their dreams for the future. When i asked Suddha
about these long conversations, however, her response was heartfelt but also ambivalent and pained: “i like talking with him. We can talk all night. But, i don’t know how much he understands. i think he does, a lot of it. But how can this be known?”
evaluations of other minds are by necessity engagements with lacunae, the projection of content into gaps. When it comes to Arjun, however, very little is taken for granted to fill that space. He would seem to demonstrate the outward signs of a cognitively complex and socially engaged existence, and yet his fam- ily believes him to have no such access to their world. even Suddha, who can understand Arjun perfectly well in the course of a normal conversation, is filled with anxiety by the ambiguity of what stands behind the things he says. How is it that all these people know so little about Arjun’s mind? or, rather, how is it that they know so much, so strangely? What motivates and maintains this claim of conspicuous absence that seems so plainly dissonant with Arjun’s vis- ible behaviors? And why is it that itinerant foreign backpackers, contextually dislocated and culturally illiterate, uniformly experience Arjun’s intelligence so differently than does his kin?
At least as far as i could ever tell, there was never anything about Arjun more particular than his deafness that led his neighbors and family mem- bers to understand him in such consistently marginal terms. To the contrary, everyone i talked to seemed to agree that he is exceptionally capable . . . as far as deaf people go. This compliment and its caveat formed a very familiar two-part refrain in my conversations with the hearing. Deaf people, it would seem, are never typical for those who know them. They are always above aver- age, at least within the space of expectation carved by their deafness. This way of talking about the deaf was a concession, i think, one meant to demonstrate generosity to the marginal without ever opening the question of whether the logic of marginality itself might be cruel and misattributed. When pressed, my sources would usually agree that as a matter of principle deaf people could be capable of anything, but they would do so reluctantly. Perhaps hospitals in foreign countries could somehow augment deaf capacities, they would say, but at least around here the long tail of possibility is occupied only by exceptions to the rule.
This question of exceptions haunts both deaf people and deaf political movements. Helen Keller, for example, is at least as famous in rural nepal as she is in urban America. This is likely due to her designation in the govern- ment social studies textbooks as a “great Person in History.” even decades
after leaving school, hearing people would recite for me with great enthusiasm the one-sentence biography they had learned by rote: Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind woman in the world to earn a bachelor’s degree. Though this prominence in the curriculum was undoubtedly meant as a gesture of inclu- sion towards people with disabilities, in practice it has become more a liability than an asset for deaf nepal. Keller’s life was indeed remarkable. She was centrally involved in many of the twentieth century’s most important transfor- mations in education, labor, and personhood. Without this context, however, her biography serves only to emphasize how singular she was as an educated individual. it is a beautiful and compelling story, but when familiar things like bachelor’s degrees demand nothing less than international greatness from the deaf, it is far too easy to expect very little from the deaf boy or deaf girl living next door.
The cold reality is that these low expectations in fact often come to be self-fulfilling. nepal is a country with very little public infrastructure, and its economic circumstances are especially stark for deaf children. most never gain access to specialized education, and even those who do often have very lit- tle interaction with deaf adults. consequently, only a small percentage of deaf people in nepal ever learn nepali Sign Language. Some come to speak and understand spoken nepali through its visual cues—so-called “lipreading”—but acquiring language in this way is both arduous and technical. for most deaf nepalis most of the time, the languages that surround them are met only as fragments and patches. As a result, the majority of nepal’s deaf children grow up never learning any language fluently. The cognitive and social effects of this isolation are devastating (mayberry and eichen 1991; meier 1991; Dyssegaard 2000; crowe, gimire, and Trollo 2016).
Arjun, of course, is anything but linguistically isolated, but it is here that we might begin to see the terms in which his ostensible inabilities are anticipated.
in an environment of far too familiar linguistic deprivation, it is telling that the conversations i witnessed about him so often began and ended with the observation that he lacks “voice” (āwaj). This statement was always met with knowing nods and sighs of pity. in South Asia, there are few things more closely identified with a person’s capacity to think, act, and accomplish than speech (Kunreuther 2006). Voice offers both a metaphor and the basic mechanism of social action, and to be without voice is thus to occupy both the symbol and the substance of an especially forceful kind of social paralysis. much like the eng- lish word dumb, the word most commonly used to refer to the deaf in colloquial
nepali — lāṭo2— also serves as a more general epithet for the stubborn and the stupid. This overlap has wide and consistent implications. in everything from folk tales to modern sitcoms, the deaf are paradigmatic fools.
it is worth noting that the same rules seem not to apply to the blind, how- ever. When hearing people shared with me their day-to-day experiences with disability, their stories were filled with blind savants and deaf village idiots, blind holy men and deaf wretches, or blind friends and deaf people who just hap- pened to live nearby. The blind were frequently the heroes or villains of the tales i heard, while the deaf typically had too little presence of self to amount to ei- ther. Blindness was an affliction, to be sure, but in the accounts i heard, its basis of suffering was often tempered by something more fundamentally positive: a transcendence above material banalities, an access to a truer wisdom, or even a higher order of sense perception (cf. miles 2001). A distant cousin of Arjun’s, for example, is both blind and well known in the area as a skilled musician. The people i asked about him were vehement that he would be nowhere near as talented as he is if he could see. As Arjun’s mother put it, “He can hear things that others can’t.” When i asked her if Arjun could likewise see things that she and i couldn’t, she merely seemed confused. i asked again, and she thought for a moment before finally replying, “Like what?” indeed, where blindness is most notable for its power to transform, deafness is perceived merely as a lack.
These narrative framings are powerful, but in the rest of this chapter i will argue that ideologies are never enough to explain how the hearing experience deafness. instead, to know Arjun is to know him through a range of social en- tanglements. He is not only deaf but also a son, a husband, and a hotel owner, and his every encounter with those around him is shaped by the intersections of these relationships. Any claim about Arjun as a deaf man must likewise be read in the context of these diverse frameworks of coherence: as a tutor for deaf children, as a consumer of middle-class lifestyle goods, as an employer in the tourism service industry, as a young husband very much in love, and as a po- tential father ambivalent about the future. Amidst these patterned histories of interaction, it is not simply that Arjun’s family members think he is a simpleton;
they experience him as such at some moments but not at others, and they persist in maintaining this organization of their experiences throughout the course of
2. As in many other places, the term most often translated as “the deaf ” in nepal more literally means “the mute,” as it is their inability to speak rather than their inability to hear that serves to define the class.
a lifetime of interactions with him. Though this separation of identity and ef- ficacy may seem paradoxical, it is ultimately a tension basic to the problem of personhood. The deafness of Arjun is not uniform but rather carves a shape in space and time.
Arjun’s language notebooks offer a particularly clear illustration of how this complexity unfolds in context. over months and years, these books have been filled with a vast collection of words and phrases shared by a diversity of native speakers, and as guides to foreign languages they have become a tremendous re- source to the family business. everyone in the household relies on them for the day-to-day demands of communicating with customers. At any given moment, a dozen different notebooks will lie scattered about the public spaces of the hotel, conspicuously disruptive of the otherwise tidy aesthetic. given how dis- organized the notebooks are, it is remarkable to me that anyone could ever find them useful, but Arjun knows the contents of each book intimately. increas- ingly, his parents do too. They know, for example, that many words and phrases about food in Korean can be found at the end of the hardback with the eagle on the cover, and that the especially tattered blue notebook is mostly french. on one occasion, i even saw Arjun’s mother frantically search the reception desk in a frustrated rage when she couldn’t find the notebooks. She needed to explain a particularly complicated bill to a tourist, and she was lost without the transla- tions they offered. These engagements demonstrate an unexpected separation between the efficacy of the things that Arjun does and the sort of person he is assumed to be. Arjun’s notebooks work, and they are useful as guides to foreign languages, but nevertheless they do not render his interior complexity visible.
instead, not knowing Arjun is a complexly structured act, mediated by elaborate patterns of what the hearing do and don’t see about him.
However relentless narratives about Arjun and his abilities might seem to be, the way his family members perceive him in social context does not ultimately depend on what he is and isn’t able to do. To properly understand these dynam- ics, we need to think about Arjun and his opacity as an ethnographic problem.
The issue here is far more layered and far more broadly involved than any survey of attitudes about deafness can reveal. instead, Arjun is experienced by those around him through countless daily interactions, each individually minuscule and ideologically habituated. Though it is convenient to characterize these in- teractions in broad terms—pity, derision, misrecognition, dismissal, neglect—i think it is also a mistake. These descriptive organizations are coherent only ret- rospectively, and they serve more generally to erase the patterns of perception
and notice that carve out a space for Arjun’s deafness in the hearing world. in the course of any given day, Arjun moves through complexly organized regimes of coherence and incoherence, recognition and invisibility, and specificity and lack. it is these patterned ways of seeing, more than any single narrative, that shape how he is knowable to those around him.
LinguiSTic DiLemmAS
To trace these patterns of perception from Arjun’s perspective, we need look no further than the dilemma he faces in language. Arjun is one of the roughly five thousand fluent speakers of nepali Sign Language (nSL). it is, in every respect, his primary language. it is the language he prefers for political debate, and it is the language he swears in when he drops something heavy on his foot.
nobody in Arjun’s family has ever encountered nSL except through him, and only Suddha has come to understand it with any degree of competency. There is nothing odd about these limitations on their access. Like all languages, nSL is something that must be learned to be known. it is anchored to the very particu- lar histories of a very particular speech community in Kathmandu, and using it effectively requires a specific and acquired knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and discursive conventions. it is not, in other words, just pantomime.
What is strange is that no one in Arjun’s family really seems to know that.
They don’t know, specifically, that Arjun knows a language that they do not.
They can communicate with him effectively enough about basic topics in some- thing that feels like signing to them, so the question of actually learning nSL doesn’t really occur to them as necessary. instead, their communication is built from what they call “natural signs”: correspondences of visual form and meaning that strike them as obvious enough to be taken for granted. To reference a cow, for example, they simply think about what a cow looks like—it has horns—and they recreate these features visually in hopes of communicating the concept.
Though some limited formal conventions have started to emerge within the household, the bulk of what Arjun’s family members call “sign language” is as- sembled from precisely this kind of flexible creativity. The family “cow” might be referenced by one gestural shape one day and another the next, and all claims, questions, or commands about a particular cow in the here-and-now tend to be limited to visually oriented adjectives and a handful of very kinetic verbs. Arjun’s family members would likely have no difficulty indicating that their particular
cow has bolted off towards the south, for example, but they would struggle to explain that they regard cows generally as sacred because they embody the selfless giving of motherhood. According to this framework of expectations, signing functions much like a game of charades, and the set of visual intuitions that make this game possible comprise the entire scope of what Arjun’s family members understand his language to be.
Suddha offers a limited exception to this very ad hoc way of engaging the question of nSL, but even her signing slides surprisingly easily between aspects of the Kathmandu standard she has picked up from Arjun and her own real- time innovations. more importantly even, she makes no distinction whatsoever between these two very different circumscriptions of Arjun’s linguistic experi- ences. indeed, when i asked Suddha why she thought she was able to commu- nicate with her husband better than anyone else could, she made no mention of having learned his language or anything else. instead, she noted that she and Arjun were close, and she speculated that this closeness caused their talk to “fit”
(najik bhaera hāmro kurā milchha). contrary to a broader intuition in nepal that language maps ethnic identity (see chapter 3), Arjun’s signing is experienced even by those closest to him as something that needs neither history nor com- munity to work. That’s the point. As with everything else about him, Arjun’s communicative practices are perceived as broadly self-evident, emergent unme- diated from his present experiential state and thus free of anything resembling the self-consciousness necessary for explicit convention. When Arjun’s family members call his signs “natural,” then, what they are saying is that they demon- strate neither more nor less than the universal human capacity to find meaning in the visual contours of the world.
The most remarkable fact is that this understanding does work for them, sort of. it works because of a very particular fact about sign language signs: in context, signs often resemble the things they mean. They are not freely gestural, but they are frequently iconic. The nSL dictionary entries for “elephant,” “water,”
“mountain,” “red,” and “trekking porter,” for example, bear striking similarities to qualities of these things that are salient to deaf and hearing nepalis alike (figures 1–5).3 elephants have trunks, water is poured into the mouth, moun- tains make a triangular shape, red powder is frequently placed between the eyes,
3. All line drawings of nSL signs in this book were created by Pratigya Shakya for the Nepali Sign Language Dictionary (nepali Sign Language national Development committee 2003), discussed in greater detail in chapter 3.
and porters carry loads with a strap across their foreheads. fast and fluent sign- ing is always opaque to outsiders, but in isolation many well-formed sentences aren’t. This is especially true when they are assembled carefully in ways meant to be accessible to the hearing. To precisely these ends, when Arjun signs with his family, he must always be cognizant of how they interpret his signs, and he uses these judgments to select vocabulary that he expects will make him easily
Figure 1. eLePHAnT Figure 2. WATer
Figure 3. mounTAin
understood. in these moments, i don’t think it is useful or interesting to suggest that these family members are speaking a “language,” least of all nSL; but what about Arjun? How should we think about his communicative practices as they engage his nondeaf family? Arjun’s language at home is clearly different to his language in Kathmandu, but it is much more difficult to say exactly how.
Deaf languages have existed as far back as our records go, but it was not until the 1960s that hearing people really started to notice them consistently. People knew, of course, that the deaf sometimes used their hands to communicate, and philosophers as far back as Plato even used this fact to illustrate far-reaching claims about the nature of the human mind (Plato 2008). Yet, even as scholars
Figure 4. reD
Figure 5. PorTer
saw deaf people using sign, they paid remarkably little attention to the fact of sign itself. instead, across this long history, signing was taken for granted as something inevitable, not built from anything contextual or historically particu- lar but rather a universal set of natural gestures available to anyone with eyes.
There was nothing, in other words, particularly deaf about sign, except perhaps for the fact that deaf people needed it. now, in linguistically minded circles at least, it is widely understood that signed languages are indeed languages in every technical and functional sense. They have grammars, vocabularies, and histories of change that are uniquely their own. All of these things were always there, of course. They might have been noticed at any time, but it wasn’t until the hearing started looking for deaf language that it came to be seen.
As a consequence of this history, perhaps, the name “nepali Sign Language”
has led many to assume that nSL draws its base from spoken nepali, translat- ing an otherwise acoustic language into a manual and visual medium. This is flatly incorrect. in reality, nSL seems to have emerged directly from its earliest community of deaf users, with no clear hereditary links to any other language, spoken or signed. That’s not to say that speakers of nSL lack access to the other languages around them. To the contrary, they are surrounded constantly by nepali and other spoken languages, and, as a direct consequence of this envi- ronment, their language possesses numerous conventions for drawing spoken- language words into the signing channel. fingerspelling, for example, allows signers to recreate letter sequences from either the roman or the Devanagari alphabets manually, but its use is limited largely to loan words and proper nouns.
A signer might fingerspell the name P-e-T-e-r to introduce me, for example, but any further account of my being hearing, American, an anthropologist, and so on, would use signs with no ties to the structure of either nepali or english.
Apart from these very limited interfaces designed explicitly to shift words across modalities, the two languages share effectively zero formal structure. instead, nSL’s linguistic history is built from distinctly deaf histories of interaction.
in Darjeeling, a nepali-speaking city in india, for example, deaf signers do not use nSL but instead another language that is itself also largely autonomous (r. j. johnson and johnson 2016). owing to the rise in recent years of deaf YouTube channels, however, Kathmandu- and Darjeeling-based signers are of- ten able to communicate with each other in a pidgin drawn from American Sign Language (ASL). American Sign Language and British Sign Language, meanwhile, bear little resemblance to each other, despite their shared context of english. instead, ASL is closely related to the languages used by signers in
both france and russia, and as a consequence of this history deaf nepalis might have an easier time communicating with deaf russians than with their neigh- bors across the indian border to the south or the chinese border to the north.
The geography here gets complicated very quickly, but there is no explanation for its shape more general than history. The distribution of linguistic diversity around the world is the consequence of accumulated patterns of migration and exchange, and sometimes these patterns are very different for the deaf than for the hearing. it is these complex social relationships, ultimately, that Arjun’s fam- ily members fail to see, and it is the absence of this social history that allows his language to appear as no more than gesture.
in this regard, Arjun’s family members are not alone. Since the rise of signed language linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s, a great deal of ink has been spilled trying to disambiguate language from gesture. Since Arjun’s family members have never learned nSL as a language, what they use to communicate with him would generally be understood as gestural, though perhaps also partially con- ventionalized enough to constitute what has been called a “homesign system”
(Senghas and coppola 2001; goldin-meadow 2005b; Brentari et al. 2012). The idea here would be that Arjun participates in two distinct though sometimes blended communicative systems. The first would be a constraint-driven archi- tecture of arbitrary rules and forms, comprising grammar and vocabulary in the traditional sense. The second, in contrast, would be an emergent system of pantomime, which imagines communication much more broadly as a series of creatively functional techniques rather than linguistic code. To this bifurcated analysis, nSL is exactly the first system disambiguated from the second. nSL is, specifically, the thing fluent signers do with each other and not what happens at the boundaries of deaf and hearing worlds. What extent of transparency exists in nSL proper then would be a relic of its gestural past, a historical legacy of etymological processes that has been supplanted by and shouldn’t be confused with the real stuff of linguistic structure. in this analysis, sign language is lan- guage precisely to the extent that it has ceased to be gestural.
The trouble is, it is not at all clear that this distinction between language and gesture is meaningfully present in what Arjun does when he signs. consider the sign for “water” (figure 2 above). is it a sign or a gesture? it is used identi- cally by both Arjun and his family members, and thus it is impossible to make a distinction in purely formal terms. Yet, clearly, there is a great deal at stake in being able to say that Arjun knows nSL but his family members do not. We could argue, perhaps, that the formational properties of WATer constitute a
linguistic lexical item for Arjun but a pantomimed gesture for his family mem- bers (or, perhaps, a lexical item in Kathmandu but a gesture at home), but at the end of it all, it is not obvious what these asymmetries of function accomplish for us analytically. This demands a complex analysis, but it also boils down to a simple fact: though the theoretical stakes of making these two speech con- texts categorically different are very high, i can’t say that i ever saw Arjun sign something to his parents that wouldn’t have been a well-formed sentence in Kathmandu as well. nSL is governed by a rich and multiply layered body of conventions, but it is remarkably difficult to outline the boundaries around it.
This ambiguity puts Arjun in a difficult position. Because his family mem- bers can understand what he is saying some of the time, seemingly without effort or foreknowledge, the moments in which they don’t take on a strange per- ceptual salience. As an experience of the senses, the partial access Arjun’s family members have to nSL stands in sharp contrast to the total opacity of japanese, english, or french. This difference between spoken and signed language was of- ten explicit in my interviews with the hearing. Arjun and i, as proficient signers, generally spoke to each other in a standard dialect of Kathmandu nSL, full of lexical, syntactic, and discursive conventions that are unknown by and thus inac- cessible to Arjun’s mother. Yet, on more than one occasion, she commented that the reason she could not understand us was because we were signing “too fast.”
When slowing down the conversation didn’t help, she suggested that perhaps our time in Kathmandu had made our thinking sloppy. The words and signs that she cannot extract from Arjun’s speech become noise in a signal otherwise as- sumed to be transparent. Arjun’s language, in this sense, is both too familiar and too alien to be identified as an independent linguistic form like nepali, english, japanese, or gurung. instead, it appears as a prosthesis—a way for the deaf to access not language but rather the effects of language in the hearing world. The idea that Arjun’s signing could be conventional or even grammatical simply doesn’t feel necessary to his family to explain the fact that it works.
This places both Arjun’s family members and the linguists of signed lan- guages in precisely the same epistemological dilemma: attempts to disambigu- ate signed language from signed gestures must necessarily turn to questions of history, of why a sign and a meaning serve to correspond. The nSL sign for
“water” and the idiosyncratic gesture occasionally used by Arjun’s family are visually identical, even as they emerge from very different histories of use. They cannot be distinguished from each other as forms unto themselves but rather only through attention to the processes by which each came to be. Because
signed language and signed gesture coexist so seamlessly in linguistic practice, however, Arjun’s family members are at risk of perceiving the particularity of neither. ultimately, they take their lack of comprehension to indicate a lack of content. They don’t know that they don’t know sign language.
We can now see Arjun’s dilemma in its sharpest light: to be effective as a signer with his family, he must organize his speech in a way that narrows the conventional dimensions of his language radically. He must bear the burden of transparency for everyone around him, anchoring his words and expressions exclusively to a here-and-now of shared perception and memory. He must cir- cumscribe his language to a history no larger than the one occupied by those immediately present. He must deny everything that makes nSL particular to a time, place, and community of practice. He must, in other words, confirm for his family members exactly what they already believe: that sign language is a trans- parent organization of basic shared experiences. This is profoundly unsatisfying for Arjun, to be sure. nevertheless, it is a bind characteristic of being deaf in hearing worlds.
mAKing SeNSe
As an interface between deaf and hearing worlds, Arjun’s language is least well known when it is most easily understood. These paradoxical circumstances are organized by the very unusual conditions of interpretability that attend to nSL signs in context. Arjun may, at his discretion, present his language to those around him in ways that make it remarkably easy for nonsigners to understand, but in so doing he erases everything that is most particular about himself. This self-effacement is something that frustrates him, but being understood is of- ten simply the more pressing necessity. By the weight of these accumulated moments, however, Arjun’s family members settle into habituated patterns of seeing, anchored by their experiences of him as someone inevitably transparent.
in the course of this perceptual history, their assessments of his abilities need not be hoisted on the back of particular narratives about disability because they feel already real enough to be taken for granted simply by the alignment of circumstances.
Here, we begin to see the shape of a much more general ethnographic theme.
Though discursive framings are of course important to Arjun’s broader story, they fail ultimately to explain his very unusual place in his family. Deafness is
not an idea underwriting cultural patterns of behavior. instead, Arjun’s experi- ences as a deaf man take their shape from the interactions of what those around him do and don’t perceive in the spaces that they cannot directly see. in this regard, what constitutes Arjun as an unusual figure in hearing contexts is not the set of beliefs about him but rather the elaborate and particular dynamic of perception that makes him known. To track this cultural dynamic effectively, we need a better way of understanding the entanglements that establish people like Arjun and Suddha, things like dictionaries and solar panels, and unifying ab- stractions like language, intention, and meaning in relation to one another. We need to know, in other words, how it is that Arjun and his deafness take shape as objects of experience in hearing places.
Arjun’s notebooks are an especially clear demonstration of this problem, highlighting the capacity of things to sometimes absorb and sometimes reflect the traces of their own social histories. from this starting point, we can begin to trace the terms by which the paradox of Arjun’s identity and public efficacy is maintained. no one denies that Arjun’s notebooks are useful, but this fact of utility does not force the hearing people in his life to evaluate the conditions of their useful possibility. instead, they are experienced in terms shaped by the per- ception of a more fundamental lack within them. “They are only empty words,”
his mother once told me. “He has a good eye, and a good hand, and he can make [the letters] beautifully. But there isn’t any sense in them.” in this explanation, the word “sense” is especially conspicuous; it is not a gloss of a nepali term but rather a loan from english, one that has taken on very distinct connotations in the contexts in which i encountered it. A person might be said to lack sense if he or she does foolish things, but equally the word might be applied to someone in a coma. in this alignment, what sense describes is something somewhere at the intersections of the sensible and the sensing.
Popular Hindi movies, for example, are often said to be high on production value, violence, and sex, but very low on sense. When i asked a friend (as many surely have before me) why a gangster started dancing in the middle of an epic gun battle, he responded dismissively: “Because the woman started dancing.
There’s no sense beyond that.” He was directing my attention, in other words, to a kind of unity that exists from frame to frame but that is absent from scene to scene. in service of this distinction, sense reveals to us how actions are motivated and how events are tied to broader histories of meaning, offering a second- order coherence to the world shaped by perception and its first-order experience of things. more specifically, what sense articulates is a recognition that things
acquire the basis of their coherence from contexts larger than themselves. The word sense was frequently invoked by the hearing people i interviewed in this new and reorganized meaning. They used it to explain not only the deaf people in their lives, but also deaf actions, deaf effects, and the things the deaf have made. in this diversity of manifestations, what sense reveals is the engagements inherent among people and things, and thus its absence for the deaf implies not randomness but rather a lack of sensitivity to higher orders of context.
consequently, when Arjun’s mother describes her son as someone who lacks
“sense,” what she is saying is that she perceives something in him to be missing.
She perceives, in other words, an absence where a presence should be. Though it is hard to identify exactly what form this presence ought to take, there is no question, i think, that it incorporates some aspect of his interiority. At its sim- plest, what Arjun lacks for those around him is the thing that would cause them to speculate about how to link his internal states to his observable behaviors. for example, if Arjun had sense, his family members would see purpose, knowledge, and agency in his tendency to fiddle with the solar panels. instead, all they see is fiddling. This is a very unusual conditioning of perception. The difference be- tween a wink and a twitch may be impossible to articulate concretely, but the ca- pacity to perceive this difference in context is nevertheless precisely what makes social phenomena possible. it is a felt presence inhabiting actions, intangible but critical to how we engage the social world. This term “presence” has a long and tangled history in research on the nature of consciousness, but i am adopting it here for more basic and more overtly ethnographic ends: in social context, intentions are things; drives are real; the abstractions that people attribute to the world are just as consequential as any material form. The contours by which these shared objects of experience go seen or unseen ultimately determine how we identify what is most profoundly human in others. Sense, in this regard, is a very particular kind of substantiating presence, felt as real within the objects of hearing perception. About Arjun, for reasons that we must make clear, no such presence is perceived to exist.
it is this same encounter with emptiness that haunts Arjun’s notebooks, and to understand the broader question of his senselessness we must understand the very contextual terms in which these notebooks are experienced. As tools for accessing foreign languages, Arjun’s notebooks are convenient, accurate, and useful. As the product of a deaf individual, however, they take on characteristics that go beyond questions of mere utility. To Arjun’s mother, for example, the fact that her son’s notebooks work does not disrupt her intuition that they are filled
with what she calls “nakalī [counterfeit/duplicate] letters.” The phrasing here is evocative, undoubtedly meant to carry with it imagery of the fake currency notes and knock-off electronics that infuse the region from across the nearby chinese border. Though counterfeit things may be indistinguishable from the originals that they imitate, they are ultimately not real in some fundamental way, and this lack of realness stands as a tangible risk to anyone who mistakes them as such. The same word is used to describe inauthentic documents that are rejected by bureaucracies, for example, or to warn men against overly “fashion- able” women (Shneiderman 2014). critically, what distinguishes the real from the nakalī is not any particular material property but rather a hidden but ines- capably consequential social history, experienced as a basic and tangible part of things as they occupy the world. in these same terms, what is missing from Arjun’s notebooks is not attributable to any dimension of form or function.
rather, Arjun’s notebooks are nakalī because they were made by Arjun.
What this framing of Arjun’s notebooks reflects is a way of relating to the ambiguities inherent in the experience of others. This question of the nakalī is rooted in contemporary nepal by histories that expand far beyond deafness.
everywhere, people are concerned that things are not as they seem. The anxi- ety is tangible, reflected in murmurs of conspiracy and unexpected spasms of public violence. These are hard times, and—as it was constantly articulated to me—even the most mundane decisions are made dangerous by a steady tension between real things and fake things and the increasing difficulties inherent in distinguishing the two. To a properly attentive mind, everything should be an object of scrutiny, from fake cookware that might explode and kill families to fake job advertisements that leave migrant workers stranded without documen- tation in hostile foreign countries. in these everyday moments, knowing how to tell if something presented as real is actually real can be mortally urgent.
Primetime sitcoms like Jire Khursānī (Hot Pepper) and Tito Satya (Bitter Truth) have leveraged this social dilemma into a distinct genre of satire, which articulates socioeconomic development as a conquest of the naïve by the savvy.
modernity, in this expression, is about knowing how to distinguish the actual from the simulated and, moreover, about the public ridicule that comes from failing to make these distinctions appropriately. The fate of those who lack such knowledge was demonstrated particularly clearly in one episode of Tito Satya that aired shortly after the end of nepal’s decade-long civil war. The story centered on a middle-aged couple visiting Kathmandu for the first time from some unnamed hinterland village. Dressed in traditional clothing and sporting
